Codespell (39 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell
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“Everything’s done except flipping the switch and hoping for a miracle.”
Smash. Thud. Howl. Something above had changed.
“Maybe that’s the cavalry arriving,” said Melchior. “Have you got a plan for the port?”
“Yep,” I said.
More crashes and howls sounded above, followed by the roar of the storm. Water started to dribble down the stairs. Apparently, whatever protected the island from waves had just broken.
“What’s the plan?” asked Melchior.
“You flip the switch, and we hope for a miracle.”
“I was afraid that was what you were going to say. Here’s hoping.”
I heard a click from behind me. It was followed by a tremendous crack from the top of the stairs. The flow of water increased, forming a large puddle. A limp bundle of green and beige tumbled down the steps to land with a splash. Megaera. Unconscious. Or dead.
Another bundle followed a moment later, this one snarling as it fell. At the last minute, it turned the tumble into something more like a roll, landing on its feet next to the fallen Fury. Nemesis.
Orange light flared in the stairwell, and a seething mass of flame dropped into view, completely enveloping Nemesis. Tisiphone, I assumed, though I couldn’t make out anything resembling human shape in that great, writhing ball of fire. As it hit the puddle, water hissed into steam, briefly obscuring my view and no doubt wrecking the closest racks of servers. I winced then and again as the two combatants slammed into a row of computers. A horrible clanging started up then.
“Oh shit,” snapped Melchior from behind me.
“What?” I risked a glance over my shoulder.
He was standing on the console of the switching computer. Behind him, lights danced across its face. Whether those meant that the computers in this room were once more connected to the main network of Necessity or just that the system was slowly shorting out was an open question. And the alarm?
“Halon system,” said Melchior. “Fire suppression.”
That was bad. “Can you find the override or whistle one up?” A halon system would flood the room with an inert nonflammable gas, one that would starve any fire of the air it needed to burn, suffocating it . . . and us.
“Working on it.” Melchior scrambled toward the back corner of the room, where a flashing light accompanied the alarm.
If we were lucky, there would be a switch there, one that would delay the halon release for as long as it was held down plus some very short number of minutes afterward to allow the button pusher a chance to escape. If we were unlucky—
“Got it!” yelled Melchior. Then he let out a quick burst of codespell. “Damn.”
“What?” I yelled.
“Magic doesn’t seem to work on the system. I’m going to have to stay here and hold the button if you don’t want to give up on breathing.”
That made us safe, for the moment, from the halon, at the cost of immobilizing Melchior. I was still trying to figure out what to do next when I realized the light had changed. The fires had gone out.
I turned back toward the door. Nemesis stood alone at the base of the stairs. I couldn’t see Tisiphone. Nemesis smiled and stepped over Megaera’s crumpled form, sauntering in my direction.
As she got closer, I couldn’t help but blanch at the ravaged condition of the body she animated. It had once been my cousin Dairn. No more. Half of his face was gone, exposing raw bone, though both mirrored eyes remained. His hair and clothes had burned away completely, and the flesh underneath was charred black where it wasn’t torn. I could still see the holes made by my gun in our last encounter and the deep gouge Tisiphone had torn in his side.
“Why aren’t you dead?” I whispered.
“Hate.” The voice was female but not feminine, and it didn’t come from the body’s closed mouth but, rather, from somewhere in the chest.
“For me? You shouldn’t have. I mean, I’m flattered and all, but—”
“For you?” growled Nemesis, still advancing. “No. For Necessity. For this.” She threw an arm out to take in the racks and racks of servers. “For three thousand years bound and bodiless in the pits of Tartarus.” She was only a few yards away by now.
“You’re barely an afterthought, the last petty wishes of this”—she pinched the flesh of a cheek that had once belonged to my cousin, tearing a piece free—“sad thing.” She opened her fingers and let it fall wetly to the ground at my feet. “Its wants and needs are no longer important. As soon as I’ve finished my business here, I’ll be moving to a new, far more appropriate, home. Do you prefer water?” Her eyes flicked back toward Megaera. “Or fire?”
I whipped my sword across her abdomen in a drawing cut. Designed for thrusting, the blade should have done little more than leave a bloody slice. Instead—maybe because of the abuse she’d already taken—it opened her up so that . . . things fell out. I tried not to look at them as I hopped backwards to give myself room.
As I began a lunge, I heard a self-harmonizing whistle start up behind me—Melchior—just barely audible over the continuing alarm bells. Nemesis whistled back, though otherwise she didn’t move, seeming to ignore me. I drove my blade straight at her left eye. Almost casually, she brought her open palm up between us so that my point slid between the bones of her hand and out the other side. Perhaps a foot of it had gone through when she twisted her wrist, yanking the hilt free of my grasp. She looked speculatively at it.
“You’re hardly worth the effort.” The words continued to echo out of her chest and didn’t even slow the speed of the whistled code coming from her lips as she dueled magically with Melchior. “But you are between me and my rightful prey.” She caught the hilt in her own right hand and yanked it free.
With a move as fast as any Fury’s, she thrust the point through my right biceps and deep into the stone wall of the room. Then, leaving me pinned like a butterfly, she passed me by. Whistle and counterwhistle continued as she headed for the connection Melchior had put together.
The pain from my arm was nauseating. I had to keep swallowing to hang on to the bile that threatened to rise up from my much-abused stomach. I turned as far as I could without twisting the blade in my wound. She had reached the switching computer and seemed to be examining the pattern of the lights. Why? It couldn’t actually be working could it? Making the port I had failed to set up?
“Hello, my old enemy,” said Nemesis, her voice too loud, “my old master—my thousand-times-damned mother. How does it feel? Alone and defenseless? Voiceless even? Knowing that I am wholly without mercy? It hurts you, doesn’t it? It certainly hurt me when you threw me in the pit.”
I was still trying to make sense of that, of the idea that the Furies were not just the successors to Nemesis but her sisters as well, when the spinnerette arrived, leaping at her over the top of the row of servers. Nemesis spun on her left heel, whipping her right foot around in a kick that connected brutally with the side of its head. There was a horrible crack, and it dropped and went forever still, its neck bent at an impossible angle.
“Pathetic,” said Nemesis as she turned back to the console. “Is that really the best you can do, Mother? Throw a toy at me? And one stolen from Fate, no less? How far you have fallen. It will be almost a mercy to put you out of my misery.”
I looked away, trying to find Tisiphone with my eyes. Nothing. The only Fury I could see was Megaera, and she had not moved. I had to do something. Had to stop Nemesis from destroying Necessity and possibly the universe with her. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I knew where I had to start. Moving as gingerly as possible, I lifted my right leg and braced my boot against the wall. Then, catching the grip of the sword in my left hand, I yanked with my whole body.
Black lightning and agony. The blood-slippery sword came free of my hand and slid through my arm until the hilt struck my flesh and brought it to a sudden, breathtaking stop. I convulsed with pain but somehow managed to get my other foot up on the wall, putting the whole of my strength into straining against the trap that held me. The sword grated free of the wall, and I fell.
I lost a couple of seconds when the end of the blade dragged along the floor, though I didn’t quite pass out. I spent a few more seconds on throwing up, then forced myself back to my feet. Ten staggering steps brought me up behind Nemesis. She was still talking to the computer, though I couldn’t seem to make sense of the words, and still whistling away. As was Melchior in a sort of magical stalemate.
Whether she hadn’t heard my approach over the alarm and her own gloating, or whether she just didn’t consider me enough of a threat to bother with, I don’t know. For whatever reason, she didn’t so much as turn an eye in my direction.
I paused for a moment, looking for some weapon to use on her. There was nothing. Nothing except the blade still sticking through my arm. I wanted to cry then, or simply walk away. I couldn’t. I had a job to do.
I braced the sword’s grip with my left hand and sort of lurched into her point first, aiming for the heart. The blade slid home well enough, but I didn’t have sufficient control to stop there. Together we toppled into the computer, driving the sword into the front panel.
As its point punched through the plastic casing and grated across the electrical connections beyond, I felt a touch of that same giddy sense of dislocation that came when I drove the athame home in my palm. The sword, lodged deep in my flesh, acted as a magical conduit, connecting me to the computer that was Necessity. Information flooded into my brain so fast that I felt as if it might burst. Images, thoughts, emotions. It was far too much for me to process or even hold on to, save only one thing. One thing that lay at the heart of the current conflict.
Pain.
The pain of a mother driven to the ultimate conflict with her firstborn daughter by the necessity of being Necessity. A pain that had prevented her from striking the killing blow she knew she should have. Pain at knowing that she had earned the hatred of a daughter who, driven by her own nature and role, must forever after become her mother’s ultimate Nemesis.
I was still trying to cope with that idea when the universe seemed to split in two, just as it had when I’d tried to jack in earlier. Again I found myself straddling the divide. In response, my nonexistent feathers decided to stand on tippy-toe and do their impression of the Bolshoi Ballet performing
Swan Lake.
In one universe, I fell through the connection into the heart of Necessity and was lost forever in that wild flood of information. In the other, I grabbed hold of the naked blade where it stood out from Nemesis’s back, intentionally slicing my hand open to expose . . . chaos?
In that instant, I understood the mystery of the two universes. It was the point of maximum uncertainty, and I had only one hope. I caught the blade, squeezed, and slid my hand along the edge. The blade, made of Fury-stuff and activated by my willing connection, exposed the chaos within me. The Raven’s shadow seemed to fill the room, bigger and darker than it had ever been before, as though the night sky had taken bird shape.
I was the Raven, a power of chaos, and what was chaos but the stuff of uncertainty itself? The blade Necessity had sent me was a key of sorts, a codespell in physical shape that allowed me to touch the power of Necessity, to play system administrator with the universe. For that brief moment
I
became the point of maximum uncertainty, the place where DecLoci were split one from the other, the bridge between order and chaos.
Reaching through the sword, I took control of the system and started making decisions. In one universe, Nemesis moved quickly enough to pull us free of the computer, and I died. In the next, I acted more quickly, twisting the point deeper into the system and creating a massive magical short, a surge of chaos so great that it fried the heart of Nemesis, bursting her body asunder and leaving her soul naked and unhoused. With no host prepared, she was powerless to prevent me sending her back to Tartarus and bondage.
I used my brief stint as administrator to choose the latter universe, and Dairn’s body came apart in an explosion of silvery lightning that banished its occupant. Instantly, a second split appeared in my mind. In one fork, the surge that destroyed Nemesis took me as well. In the other, Tisiphone, who had been sneaking up from behind, caught the blade between Nemesis and me, grounding the magical charge and frying the entire row of servers touched by her trailing wings. Again, I took the second path. Tisiphone screamed.
Even as the shorting switch console died, and the power faded away, I had a final choice. Allow the surge to stop her heart or take the last of the feedback into my own body and me into a long darkness, walking just this side of the border between life and death.
Lights out.

 

EPILOGUE
The lanai of Raven House is a beautiful place to eat and watch the sun go down, especially in company.
“Lovely,” said the redhead sitting across the table from me.
I nodded, but didn’t respond aloud. I was having a bad week. For starters, I was having dinner with the wrong redhead. Don’t mistake me, the more I see of Thalia, the more I like her, but I’d really been hoping for a very different evening with a very different titian-haired goddess.

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